Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - Wednesday, October 30, 1996
The gradual disappearance of the cells, also known as CD4 cells, is an indicator that cancer or a life-threatening infection is about to strike.
In tests on 31 volunteers whose CD4 counts had dropped to an average of 428 cells per cubic millimeter of blood, a group led by Dr. Joseph Kovacs of the National Institute of Health found that injections of interleukin-2 for one year brought the typical CD4 count up to a much healthier 916.
The 29 patients who did not receive the chemical saw their CD4 counts drop from an average of 406 at the start of the experiment to 349. Only when the formal experiment ended and the 29 were also allowed to get the drug did their average CD4 counts rise.
In most cases the benefits of the treatments have persisted, in some cases for more than four years, according to the report, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
"We have shown that intermittent interleukin-2 therapy can lead to substantial and sustained increases in the number and percentage of CD4 cells," the Kovacs team concluded.
No other treatment, they said, "has been shown to be capable of inducing increases in CD4 counts of this magnitude and duration."
Whether the higher counts will ultimately translate into longer lives for people with the AIDS virus HIV remains to be determined.
Interleukin-2, also known as aldesleukin, is sold under the brand name Proleukin by Chiron Corp of Emeryville, Calif.
Last year the same teams published a pilot study suggesting that the interleukin-2 treatment would be effective in HIV patients whose CD4 counts had not dropped below 200. However that experiment also suggested that the drug might increase the amount of HIV in the blood, and higher HIV levels usually suggest that the disease is progressing rapidly.
However, in this new larger study, the Kovacs team did not find evidence of a surge in HIV levels in the blood.
The drug did, however, produce side effects that were not caused by the other anti-AIDS medicine.
The frequency of side effects from the 157 interleukin-2 treatments was 90 percent for fatigue or malaise, 20 percent for headache, diarrhea and stomatitis (an inflammation of lining of the mouth), 17 percent for abdominal pain, 13 percent for fever and muscle pain, and 10 percent for sinus congestion and low blood pressure.
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